I've posted this question on many hardware forums and we still haven't been able to figure anything out. I am hoping afterdawn can finally shed some light on this bastard of an issue.
I'll start out with my system specs
1.6 p4 @ 1.74
1024 corsair ram 3200
asus p4c800-e deluxe motherboard
500watt ps
maxtor 7200 120gb
quantim fireball 12gb (windows installed here)
geforce 4 4600ti 128mb
Okay I recently bought City of Heroes and my computer ran it flawlessly on max settings.
I then received a new motherboard and powersupply and installed them and reformatted my 12gb harddrive.
The 120gb drive only had 2 gigs used so I didn't need to reformat it.
I reinstalled windows and installed EVERY driver and EVERY piece of software/driver that came with my deluxe asus cd-rom including the latest bios.
I've downloaded the 53.03 nvidia drivers which preform with my 4600ti the best. I have directx 9.0b. Viewsonic A90f+ 19inch drivers installed. My intel board drivers installed. New bios installed. I have every critical update for microsoft windows installed. I've switched my ram to different dimms with no success. I have reinstalled windows a second time. Used XP game preformance and ram boosting software with no change in preformance.
Somewhere or something is bottlenecking me and causing lag on a game that once ran flawless. I now have the game turned down to the lowest settings and it lags to an almost unplayable level whereas at max settings prior to reformatting it ran like a gem.
With the new godly asus board which I set at a 10% overclock rate it should run EVEN FASTER! Instead it runs much slower.
I never have anything on taskbar running and even at a fresh boot I get this bottleneck/horrid frame rate lag for some reason.
My CPU temp is 32c
my MB temp is 33c
I am running 4x and everything in bios seems configured properly. I turned off anti-aliasing, vertical sync.. still to no avail I lag.
I have tried practically everything I can possibly think of and taken in many suggestions from other tekkies but we still haven't figured this phenom out.
I'm receiving my new 3.0e p4 processor on monday so hopefully that will clear this whole issue up but I'd like to know what is bottlenecking my system so I don't encounter this again in the future.
If anyone has any suggestions or ideas I will gladly try them out and post a response. I'd appreciate any suggestions or help you folks could give.
PIO vs DMA? Did you disable system restore? Did you somehow disable L1/L2? Turn down the video acceration? Accidentally change the audio performance from "best quality"? Accidentally turn down DX Acceleration?
To Check for DMA: (1) Control Panel, (2) System, (3) Goto the Hardware Tab, (4) Device Manager, (5) IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers, (6) Right Click on Primary IDE Channel --> Properties, (7) Goto the Advanced Settings Tab, Make sure both drop down boxes say 'DMA if Available', Click OK, (8) Right Click on Seconady IDE Channel --> Properties, (9) Goto the Advanced Settings Tab, Make sure both drop down boxes say 'DMA if Available', Click OK, (10) Reboot.
System Restore can be turned off from the SYstem Properties (Control --> System --> System Restore)
L1/L2 Cache should be enabled -- check your BIOS (prolly under Advanced Chipset Settings or something like that)
VIdeo Acceleration: Control --> Display --> Settings --> Advanced --> Troubleshoot --> FULL
Sound Acceleration: Control --> Sounds --> Audio --> Advanced --> Performance --> Full & Best
DirectX Accel: Start --> Run --> dxdiag --> Display --> Make sure everything is enabled
Try running some benchmarks (i reccomend PC Wizard, which in almost all respects is like Sandra except its free). Run the CPU, Memory, RAM and DirectX tests to try and figure out what subsystem is messing up. You can get PCWizard (and CPUz which is also very useful- and free) from http://www.cpuid.com/
Okay praetor I checked every setting and everything was already set just as you suggested.
I couldn't find l1/2 cache in bios and I checked every setting.
The only strange thing is when my computer boots it says before loading XP..
It scans for bios and can't find it on raid or something then says bios isn't installed yet everything in bios seems to work properly etc when xp is loaded. Not sure what that is all about.
